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The Big Freeze Holds: A New Study Reaffirms an Accelerating Universe
A long running methodological dispute over how cosmologists measure cosmic expansion has reached a provisional ceasefire, with the standard candle approach still standing.
A long running methodological dispute over how cosmologists measure cosmic expansion has reached a provisional ceasefire, with the standard candle approach still standing.
For most of the past decade, a quiet but consequential argument has been running inside cosmology. The two sides agree on almost everything: the universe is expanding, that expansion is accelerating, and the most likely long-term fate is a cold, slow fade called the Big Freeze. What they have not agreed on is whether the measurement methods behind that consensus are actually sound. A new study in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society argues they are, and that is a more important result than the cosmic-fate headline suggests.
The paper, published June 10, 2026, is led by Phil Wiseman of the University of Southampton and is described by Gizmodo's science desk as a "rebuttal of a rebuttal" of the standard accelerated-expansion view. The prior challenge came from a November 2025 MNRAS paper led by Young-Wook Lee at Yonsei University, which argued that the Type Ia supernovae cosmologists use as "standard candles" carry an age-related systematic bias. If Lee's critique had survived, the inference that the universe's expansion is accelerating, and with it the Big Freeze prediction, would have been back in play for revision.
The Wiseman team's response, as reported by Gayoung Lee for Gizmodo, re-examines the same datasets and finds the alleged age bias does not meaningfully distort the acceleration signal. That puts the burden back on Lee's group to either refine its critique or concede the point. The November 2025 paper is not retracted, and Lee's specific concern is still part of the methodological literature. What has changed is the weight of evidence: another peer-reviewed study has examined the claim and found it wanting.
This is a methodological story, not a metaphysical one. The standard candles in question, Type Ia supernovae, are thermonuclear explosions that reach roughly the same peak brightness, which is why they are useful for measuring distance. The accelerating-expansion consensus that earned Adam Riess, Saul Perlmutter, and Brian Schmidt the 2011 Nobel Prize rests on those measurements, combined with the cosmic microwave background and baryon acoustic oscillations. The Lee-Wiseman exchange is about whether the candles are as uniform as the method assumes, and specifically whether older progenitor stars produce slightly different supernovae that could skew distance estimates. Wiseman et al. say no, at least not in a way that would change the headline result.
Why this matters beyond the room it was argued in: the Big Freeze is the leading fate scenario, but the path to that scenario runs through dark energy, the placeholder name for whatever is driving the acceleration. The new study does not change what dark energy is. It does change how much confidence the field can place in the rate at which that acceleration is happening. Those are different questions, and the popular framing of "scientists confirm the universe will end in ice" tends to collapse them. The acceleration rate is now better constrained. The nature of the driver is as open as it has ever been, which is one reason the Department of Energy and partner agencies are still funding dedicated dark-energy observatories.
There is a temptation to read the Wiseman paper as the final word. It is not. Lee's age-bias critique is one of several method-level challenges raised against the standard-candle pipeline over the years, and a single rebuttal paper does not retire a methodological question. What it does is shift the default position: the next paper in this exchange now needs to find something the Wiseman team missed, not just restate the original critique. That is how convergence happens in observational cosmology, slowly, paper by paper, with each round tightening the error bars or ruling out a specific alternative.
The longer horizon here is not the fate of the universe, which is a story measured in timescales so vast that no human institution will be around to witness it. The shorter horizon is whether the next generation of surveys, the Vera Rubin Observatory's LSST, the Roman Space Telescope, and the dark-energy spectroscopic instruments coming online in the late 2020s, will tighten the acceleration measurement enough to constrain what dark energy actually is. That is the open question worth tracking, and the Wiseman paper is best read as another data point in that multi-decade campaign rather than a conclusion to it.
For now, the Big Freeze holds. The candles are dimmer than some critics argued, but not dim enough to break the model. Cosmologists know more about how fast the universe is stretching and slightly less about why, which is the usual direction of travel for a field that is mostly working in the dark about its own central quantity.